There’s an old French proverb: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” first coined by French columnist and novelist Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), which loosely translates to: “The more we change, the more we stay the same.”

Before the internet, we all operated in virtual seclusion and isolation, as individuals in our world. Collaboration only occurred in Multinational Corporations that operated across different countries and cultures. In the business world, ideas and innovation spread in limitation, only to organizations that had the resources and means to communicate

Fast forward to the Internet and Social Media era, connecting the human race like never before in history, like a labyrinth of busy bees.

Facebook, Twitter, Linked-IN, Groupon, and Crowdsourcing are becoming a common part of our vocabulary and lifestyle… through which mediums we are connected through our work, and the objects that inspire us. And for all the children born in internet era, life without it is simply unfathomable.

I’ve been on a personal mission myself, in pursuit of suspiciously similar looking Logos and Corporate Identities. A fruitful quest to date, having come across myriad doppelgängers, look-alikes, wannabes, copies, or plain plagiarism. Sheer coincidence? Or copycats? An ever changing, ever amassing encyclopedia of visual identity is just a click away.

Turns out being a true original is increasingly difficult, if not virtually impossible.